This is a continuation of application Ser. No. 12/804,397 filed Jul. 20, 2010.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is generally in the field of electronic circuits and systems. More specifically, the present invention is in the field of communications circuits and systems.
2. Background Art
As communications technologies move toward ever smaller device sizes and adopt ever lower power consumption constraints, identifying and harnessing operational synergies through the use of circuit combinations capable of sharing system functionality becomes increasingly important. Consider, for example, a conventional radio frequency (RF) receiver implemented in a communications transceiver. A conventional receiver typically utilizes several stages to amplify and process what may often be a weak reception signal. For instance, a low noise amplifier (LNA) may be used to boost the reception signal prior to down-conversion from RF to baseband by a mixer stage in the is receiver “front-end.” The baseband signal is then normally filtered by a high-order low-pass filter (LPF), for example a 4th-order or 5th-order LPF, which provides substantial additional “back-end” gain in the conventional receiver design.
In such a conventional receiver, the gain control provided by the receiver as a whole may be primarily produced by the receiver back-end, with the high-order LPF contributing a significant portion of the overall gain. Due to the stringent requirements imposed on the high-order LPF in conventional receiver designs, however, the high-order LPF typically consumes much of the power and dominates most of the area required to implement the receiver. As communications technologies move toward ever smaller device sizes and adopt ever lower power consumption constraints, as represented by the 40 nm technology node, for example, the relative bulk and high power consumption of conventional receiver architectures have become ever more undesirable.
Thus, there is a need to overcome the drawbacks and deficiencies in the art by providing an interface circuit configured to facilitate generation of the synergies possible through shared functionality by a circuit combination, thereby enabling design of more efficient communications systems, such as a compact low-power receiver architecture suitable for implementation as part of a mobile device transceiver, for example.